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Harper's throne speech can’t compete with ‘Duffy Diaries’: Tim Harper

A new government agenda will hit the ethics wall next week. Bet on the wall winning the day.

Workers prepare the Senate chamber in Ottawa on Thursday in advance of the government's throne speech, which will be delivered there next week. (CHRIS WATTIE / REUTERS)

Conservatives in the capital have been hinting that Prime Minister Stephen Harper — pictured here in Malaysia last week — wants to call a referendum on Senate reform.
(Sean Kilpatrick / THE CANADIAN PRESS file photo)

A mid-term speech from the throne that was months in the making could be a one-day wonder for the Conservatives next week.

No throne speech can turn the focus from a growing list of ethical transgressions that are mounting for Harper and both opposition parties are straining at their leash like a hungry dog which just spotted a steak.

Since the Commons last convened, Pamela Wallin’s spending audit exploded and she grudgingly repaid more than $100,000 to the Senate while decrying its “lynch mob” mentality.

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There have been new RCMP revelations about the number of people around Harper who were aware of a $90,000 deal between the prime minister’s former chief of staff, Nigel Wright, and former Conservative Sen. Mike Duffy.

On top of his existing troubles, the RCMP is now investigating Duffy for fraud and breach of trust related to a $65,000 payment to an old crony who concedes he did no work for the senator.

Dean Del Mastro, Harper’s former parliamentary secretary, is facing four charges relating to allegations he exceeded his campaign spending limit and filed a false accounting of his 2008 campaign expenses.

Patrick Brazeau, another former Conservative senator, faces charges of assault and sexual assault. Unknown health problems have pushed his case into the new year.

Unless you propose changing the words to the national anthem, or a rogue page interrupts proceedings for her 15 minutes of fame, throne speeches are usually quickly forgotten anyway, couched as they are in banalities, generalities, vague promises wrapped in soaring sentences and flowing words which lead nowhere.

But in this case, the political stakes for Harper are huge because he is entering what is likely the most crucial two-week period of his majority stewardship.

Next Wednesday’s throne speech will deliver a message to the country as a whole.

More importantly, a little more than two weeks later, he must stand before the increasingly restless faithful in Calgary at the party’s postponed national convention and convince them that he has not lost his moral compass, that these ethical eruptions can be overcome and the road ahead is still clear.

Conservatives in the capital have for weeks been strongly hinting that Harper wants to call a referendum on serious Senate reform or abolition, but his hands are tied because he has referred the Senate question to the Supreme Court.

The government may promise to clean up the Senate mess, but without court guidance, they cannot tell Canadians how they will do it. Harper cannot get to the front of the parade and recast himself as the great Senate reformer until he hears the court’s advice.

He is also likely, in the throne speech, to promise electoral reform to deal with the robocalls scandal of the 2011 campaign, but this is already long overdue.

His government promised such a move last April and withdrew it a day before it was to be introduced in the Commons. Expect a promise to give Elections Canada more power to crack down on misleading phone calls and give its investigators the power to force witnesses to testify in its investigations.

But other themes, stressing families, jobs, consumer-friendly policies, celebrating our heritage and the old standby, law-and-order, cannot compete with the “Duffy Diaries.”

The binder of Duffy’s travels and engagements and hundreds of emails in the hands of police all relate back to a question that transcends Senate sleaze — how many people in Harper’s office knew about the payout from Wright to Duffy.

And the larger question — as that net casts wider and wider — how does Harper convince Canadians that he knew nothing about what was going on in his own office on the Duffy affair?

The questions will start flowing again next week, even if the answers won’t.

The government will tell us these miscreants are no longer in their caucus and that matters are before the police.

But in the battle between the irresistible force, the throne speech, and the immovable object, the ethics wall, the smart money has to be on the wall.

Tim Harper is a national affairs writer. His column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. tharper@thestar.ca Twitter:@nutgraf1

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